A Messiah Who Will Cost You Everything
Text: Matthew 8:18-22
Introduction
1. Illustration: Salvation is free, ... but discipleship will cost you your life. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
2. Illustration: In The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “The cross is laid on every Christian. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death–we give over our lives to death. The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
3. Following Jesus will cost you:
a. Security
b. Convenience
4. Read Matthew 8:18-22
Proposition: When we decide to follow Jesus, we are surrenduring everything.
Transition: We must first understand that...
I. Jesus Will Cost You Security (18-20).
A. Cross to the Other Side
1. Matthew you begins this narrative with "When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he instructed his disciples to cross to the other side of the lake."
a. The expression "other side" usually marks Jesus’ movement across the Sea of Galilee, on this occasion from the primarily Jewish region on the west side to the primarily Gentile region on the east side (Wilkins, NIV Application Commentary, New Testament: Matthew, 346).
b. This is not a call to get away from the crowd, but a call of discipleship to go where you are needed even if it is uneasy.
c. Let’s be honest, if Jesus only called people to places of security Hawaii would be filled with missionaries!
d. However, he calls us to leave behind those places that make us feel secure to those places where we are needed.
2. Once they get to the other side of the lake, "one of the teachers of religious law said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”
a. This person was a teacher of the religious law, an expert in handling written documents.
b. In the ancient world only a few people could read and write. Although the Jews had a higher percentage of the population trained in reading and writing, only a special group regularly worked with written materials, and even fewer had access to books or Scriptures.
c. The capabilities of scribes went far beyond simple secretarial skills to include teaching, interpretation, and regulation of laws (Wilkins, 346).
3. This is out of the ordinary for the teachers of the law in Matthew.
a. Most of them are against Jesus, but for some reason this one seems willing to associate himself with Jesus. At least, that is the way it appears at first (France, 325).
b. "I will follow you" normally indicates a desire for a discipleship relationship, but this man has in mind the kind of master-disciple relationship in which a potential disciple examines various masters and then enlists himself with the most popular or the best-equipped one (Wilkins, 347).
c. Jesus knew that a strong profession does not necessarily reflect strong commitment.
d. He claimed to be willing to follow Jesus wherever he might go, but Jesus sees through the mask and challenges him by pointing out the consequences of following him.
4. He says to this man, “Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head.”
a. Rabbis enjoyed a relatively high status within Judaism, but Jesus has no school or synagogue or prestigious place of honor among the religious establishment.
b. He stays at the home of friends, relatives, and disciples through most of his ministry.
c. Matthew indicates that this man’s zealous outside is superficial at best, and is not matched with a heart felt devotion to follow Jesus when things get difficult (Turner, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, 129).
d. His enthusiasm was fueled by glitter and glory of Jesus miracles, but was not taking into account that following Jesus requires surrendering everything.
5. Here Jesus refers to himself with his favorite way of identifying himself: Son of Man.
a. Daniel 7:13-14 (NLT)
13 As my vision continued that night, I saw someone like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient One and was led into his presence.
14 He was given authority, honor, and sovereignty over all the nations of the world, so that people of every race and nation and language would obey him. His rule is eternal—it will never end. His kingdom will never be destroyed.
b. This is how this teacher thinks following Jesus will be like, but he ignores what other Scriptures say about him, like...
c. Isaiah 53:3 (NLT)
3 He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.
d. He is willing to follow Jesus when things are good and it puts him in the limelight, but as soon as things get difficult he will scatter like the wind.
e. He wants to be Jesus groupie, but not his disciple.
B. Know What You’re Getting Into
1. Illustration: Garibaldi had an incredibly committed volunteer army. He would appeal for recruits in these terms: “I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart and not with his lips only, follow me!” Jesus invites you to discipleship. But He lets you know up front that it is a commitment that will cost you something. It’s not going to be easy. To paraphrase Garibaldi, “Let him who loves the Lord with his heart and not with his lips only, be Jesus’ disciple!”
2. Mark 10:38 (NLT)
But Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you are asking! Are you able to drink from the bitter cup of suffering I am about to drink? Are you able to be baptized with the baptism of suffering I must be baptized with?”
3. Following Jesus will cost you the security of the familiar.
a. He does not call us so that we can stay in the security of what we know.
b. He calls us to "cross over to the other side of the lake."
c. To a place that is unfamiliar, unknown and unpredictable.
d. He calls us to do what we have never done, go where we have never gone, and trust him to meet our needs.
4. Following Jesus will cost you the security planning.
a. What he has planned for you be far removed from what you have ever imagined.
b. What he has planned for you may not be where all of the glitz and fame are found.
c. What he has planned for you may not be acceptable to friends and family.
d. What he has planned for you may not fit into a neat and tidy package.
e. However, to be anywhere else than in the center of the will of God is the worst place to be.
5. Following Jesus will cost you the security of popularity.
a. He may cost you family.
b. He may cost you friends.
c. He may cost opportunities.
d. But in the words of Tobby Mac, "I don’t want to gain the whole world and lose my soul." (Show video)
Transition: As if losing security was not enough...
II. Jesus Will Cost You Comfort (21-22).
A. Follow Me Now
1. After dealing with the religious teacher, Matthew tells us, "Another of his disciples said, “Lord, first let me return home and bury my father.”
a. Matthew refers to this man as "another disciple," indicating that both this man and the teacher of the law where followers of Jesus in some sense of the word.
b. There were not non-believers, but there understanding of the true nature of a disciple were sorely lacking.
2. The word disciples comes from the Greek word mathetes.
a. A man is called a mathetes when he binds himself to someone else in order to acquire his practical and theoretical knowledge (New International Dict of NT Theology. Pradis CD-ROM:Articles/D/Disciple, Follow, Imitate, After/ maqhthv" >/CL).
b. His binds himself to the master no matter how difficult things may be or what he has to sacrifice.
3. At first glance what he is asking of Jesus doesn’t seem that unreasonable.
a. Burial of the dead superseded other religious obligations in Israel, even for the priests, who were allowed to be defiled by touching the dead if it was a family member (Lev. 21:2).
b. The obligation to care for the dead came implicitly from the command to "honor your father and your mother" (Wilkins, 349).
4. However, Jesus’ demand may prove less harsh in some respects than it sounds to us at first.
a. The disciple is probably not asking permission to attend his father’s funeral later that day; his father likely either was not yet dead or had been buried once already.
b. When a father died, mourners would gather immediately and a funeral procession would take his body to the tomb, leaving no time for a bereaved son to be talking with rabbis.
c. The phrase was a common Near Eastern figure of speech that referred to a son’s responsibility to help his father in the family business until the father died and the inheritance was distributed.
d. Obviously such a commitment could involve a long period of time, thirty or forty years or more if the father was relatively young (The - MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Matthew 8-15).
5. So Jesus words to this disciple are a challenge, “Follow me now. Let the spiritually dead bury their own dead.”
a. The expression allow the dead to bury their own dead was a proverbial figure of speech. It meant, "Let the world take care of the things of the world." The spiritually dead can take care of their own things (The - MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Matthew 8-15).
b. Jesus is elevating his call to "follow me" above all other allegiances. Anything that gets in the way of unqualified commitment to him must be set aside.
6. He has the opposite problem of the teacher of the law.
a. The teacher of the law was superficial, but this man is overly cautious.
b. The teacher of the law was looking for fame and prestige in following Jesus, but this man is willing to follow Jesus as long as everything is according to his sense of order.
c. This man is looking for comfort, but Jesus is looking for commitment.
B. Priority Number One
1. Illustration: Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace ... is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship).
2. Colossians 1:18 (NASB)
He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
3. Following Jesus will cost you the comfort of the acceptable.
a. He calls us to worship him in ways that others find unacceptable.
b. He calls us to serve him in ways that others find unacceptable.
c. He calls us to sacrifice things that others find unacceptable.
4. Following Jesus will cost you the comfort of control.
a. We love being in control of our circumstances, actions, and future.
b. He calls us to give him complete and total control of our lives.
c. Romans 8:8-9 (NLT)
8 That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God.
9 But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to him at all.)
d. We like to think that we hold the keys to our own destiny, but if we follow Jesus we surrender our destiny to him.
5. Following Jesus will cost you the comfort of convenience.
a. It requires giving up the convenience of doing our own thing.
b. It requires the convenience of our time, because our time becomes his time.
c. It requires giving up the convenience of "I don’t feel like going to church today."
d. It requires giving up the convenience of "I can’t afford to pay my tithes."
e. Our time, feelings, and money all belong to Jesus.
Conclusion
1. Are you willing to give up your security?
a. Are you willing to cross to the other side?
b. Are you willing to give up the familiar, planning, and popularity?
2. Are you willing to give up comfort?
a. Are you willing to be uncomfortable?
b. Are you willing to be unacceptable?
c. Are you willing to give up convenience?
d. Are you willing to give up total control?
3. Are you ready to follow Jesus?
